Alma Whittaker is the friend I needed during a cold winter of grief. The secret life of mosses revealed truths for her that science had not yet seen in her time. She loved reading and her mother taught her to read, write and speak several languages before her premature death of cancer in Alma's adolescence. Her adopted, beautiful, sister Prudence is in many things her opposite but also her most faithful friend. Prudence does not put much effort into science. In stead she dedicates her whole life to fight slavery and rescue former slaves to freedom.
This novel that literally offers the reader a trip around the world of science and the search for the answer to the question which Darwin never could understand: why we do good to each other. Why are there so many Dorothea Brookes and Prudences in this world of survival of the fittest?
Sometimes we cannot get answers to the questions we have but it is a great comfort that we have that question, still unanswered, for without that phenomenon, who would survive at all? What would become of us all?
One of the novels I've read that will remain in my heart and head for as long as I breath is Toni Morrison's magnificent Beloved. When I first read it I was expecting my fourth child, exactly as Sethe, the main character of the novel does in the beginning of her escape from "Sweet Home farm" in Kentucky, to freedom on the north shore of the Ohio. I felt her love for the third child so deeply , the premature beautiful little girl Beloved that had to die to give her family a new life in freedom. Oh, the love you can hold for your baby girl, nothing compares to that. It's a "thick love" as Paul D puts it, "too thick". Toni Morrison manages to conjure up this love so vividly that it almost suffocated me. Pregnant with number four, as Sethe was when she escaped Scoolteacher's boys who stole the milk Beloved should have once they were all safe on the north bank of the Ohio. When I read the novel for the first time I was Sethe.
Sethe filled with strength and ardour. Sethe filled to the brim with the thickest love you can think of. Sethe fighting for freedom and for her children. Sethe finding an unexpected midwife in the forest on the river bank: a whitewoman. This white young woman is not amongst those who turn in fugitive slaves for rewards. In stead she helps Sethe to give birth to a baby girl with a charmed life. This little girls gets her name, Denver, from the whitewoman Amy Denver.
I think I felt so close to Sethe because my number three also felt so especially close to me when I was pregnant with number four. I realized how she felt when she wanted to save her children from the slave hunters by killing them and I had experienced her agony when her breasts were filled with milk but had none to give it to, since I had lost a child , the first number four, a year before I first read Beloved.
This time I felt so close to Denver I saw her grow up to a head strong woman with self esteem in the centre of her community, from being a weak, lonely and dependent child. Denver saved her mother from mental illness and grief that almost killed her. The vengeful baby that almost killed Sethe made Denver find herself and the grown up Denver resembled her father Halle who couldn't escape slavery but paved the wave for his mother, the spiritual leader Baby Suggs, and family with his own hard working body.
Paul D is also a character that stands out more this time, when I read Beloved together with a class of only male students in the same age and passage of life as Denver is in the novel. Paul D is a person to relate to for a young construction worker-to-be. Intelligent, though he can't read and write, a handyman, he figures out how to survive 18 years of tribulations knowing his value as a slave, exactly, put in dollars-rather high. A man with a tin box heart and hands that can take the pain from the choke cherry tree whipped into Sethe's back by the boys who stole Sethe's milk. A trustworthy man. Always remembering Sethe and her glowing eyes, the girl all the Sweet Home men fell in love with, but only Halle got for a wife.
The notion of a real wedding made the kind Mrs. Garner laugh out loud. She cared for her slaves but who would think of an atrocity as a real wedding for slaves? Mrs. Garner was like a mother to Sethe, however, it's hardly likely that Mrs. Garner felt like a mother to Sethe. For Sethe all human beings were alike; good or bad, no matter the colour of skin. Although Mrs. Garner was a kind and "good" slave owner, she still was a slave owner. Sometimes she acted as if Sweet Home really was one, but when Mr. Garner died and she fell fatally ill with cancer the Sweet Home men and women got to see reality: it's a difference between being free and not. Slave owners and slaves don't relate as mother and daughter. Schoolteacher comes since Mrs. Garner wouldn't trust those who imagined themselves to be her family. To her they were family, sort of, but no more than her horses and dogs were family.
The underground railroad across the Ohio was the life
line for those who realized that freedom is something else than slavery, no matter how life like the home feeling gets on the plantation that also were their prison camp. When the illusion of home died with Mrs. Garner's fading voice-lost to cancer- and the cruel Schoolteacher, slavery showed its real self.
Although freedom hardly was the schlaraffen land they imagined before they
settled outside Cincinnatti it was as far from slavery as the harvest moon from the corn field where Sethe's children were concieved.
Stamp Paid knew the river, every snag and curve,
all the banks and shores and under water rocks. He knew the river and he knew what happened when Baby Suggs gave a party for her daughter-in-law and her children. Stam Paid saved lives on the river as well as he saved the lives of Sethe's two small sons when Sethe paid for their freedom with the blood of her beloved baby girl. She bought their freedom but was it worth it? Yes, she never had to be parted from her children. Baby suggs had to part with seven children. Than Halle bought her freedom but perished before he could reach it himself. Eight children the only remianing were Sethe and three of her grand children. Yes, freedom was even worth the horrible prize Sethe payed.
Stamp Paid, he was also paid for. his freedom also had a proze as all creation's freedom has a prize. So many allusions to the Great Story of redemption. i didnät notice them before, but this time we read the novel during Lent. My students also noticed Jesus everywhere. And all the music.
Beloved is a novel of realistic hope. Presented as a down to earth low fantasy, horror and documentary in one, created by the means of exquisite prose. The story of 124, number three is missing, on the outskirts og Cincinatti is the American equivalent of Middlemarch filled with characters that we all could relate to because we are all human beings born to be free, lost in captivity and bought back to freedom with thick love.
